"Unity is strength." Revolutionary slogan and popular song of 1943. Shot on Huaihai Road in Shanghai, China. From 'Subtitles - Chapter 2, Vox Populi.'

"The iPhone 8 will be released soon" A fake propaganda banner shot in front of the Apple Store on Nanjing road, Shanghai, China. From 'Subtitles - Chapter 2, Vox Populi.'

"A good product is not cheap, for cheap you will not get any good product." Popular Chinese saying. Fake propaganda banner shot in a slaughterhouse in Shanghai, China. From 'Subtitles - Chapter 2, Vox Populi.'

Leleu is reluctant to identify where shots from Chapter 3 were taken to emphasize the global impact of pollution. From 'Subtitles - Chapter 3, Silent Protest.'

This year Leleu brought his large format camera on his annual vacation home, as well as a blank propaganda banner. From 'Subtitles - Chapter 3, Silent Protest.'

Leleu's rural roots run deep. In the future he would like to reintroduce craft brewing to the family farm and to create space for photo exhibitions and workshops. From 'Subtitles - Chapter 3, Silent Protest.'

Through striking red banners hung by the Chinese governement, future evictees of Shanghai’s poor neighborhoods are asked to welcome the wrecking ball of progress as a social improvement, not a potential life catastrophe. The government doesn’t hang banners in upscale shopping districts or blocks of high rent towers, just the grim neighborhoods of the urban poor who stand in the way of more malls and condos.

This juxtaposition is the subject of French photographer Eric Leleu‘s project, Subtitles. But not only does Leleu document these contrasts, he takes them one step further by satirizing the practice with his own banners.

Leleu isn’t a tourist but an expat with nearly a decade in China under his belt. Subtitles grew from Leleu’s desire to understand the impenetrable banners strewn throughout the city. “They were so big and strong and violent,” he says from his family’s farm outside Lille, France, “and I didn’t have a clue what they meant.”

Subtitles is broken into three “chapters,” the first takes a direct look at official Communist Party banners that hang in the side streets of Shanghai’s poorest neighborhoods – the bureaucratic slogans become menacing gashes amidst crumbling homes, empty alleys and the promise of worse to come. In his second chapter, Leleu riffs on the government’s use of banners by fabricating his own, printing alternative slogans on them and hanging them himself. Photographs in the third and final chapter show blank red banners strung up in rural settings, a silent cry from nature far away from the political noise of urban China.

Despite having already lived in Shanghai for five years when he began Subtitles, Leleu’s Chinese remained poor. When it grew annoying to badger friends for translations on the street, he began to take pictures for future study.

Before moving abroad, Leleu lived a rudderless 9-to-5 routine in Paris, bouncing between soccer clubs and venture capital firms in pursuit of his MBA. He took an internship as an executive assistant at the French photo agency Sipa, having caught the shutter bug on a trip to Calcutta. Leleu had played around with negatives as a child in the darkroom on his family farm, but he never progressed beyond attacking the developing prints with toothbrushes. Now he was spending his days hanging out with photographers. Unfortunately, not all the pros he met carried his same enthusiasm for the medium.

“Photographers start their career as a passion and for most of them it becomes a job,” he says.

Leleu could have remained with Sipa and forged an office career while working on photography in his spare time. Instead he bought a refurbished Mac, a cheap digital camera and a ticket to Shanghai. He stayed for six months.

Setting up base at a friend’s house, Leleu threw himself into the confusing tangle of urban China and the growing community of expats drawn by the opportunities of a booming economy. The Paris Ministry of Youth had awarded him some funding to shoot contemporary life in Shanghai, but it was his first commission that sealed his decision to relocate permanently. A young, English-speaking Chinese couple answered his classified ad and paid him 100€ to shoot their family.

Shortly thereafter, Leleu pulled up European stakes for good. Sipa hired him periodically to liaise with locals for photo shoots. Grunt work paid the rent, but more importantly, it kept him in touch with photographers whom he could watch, work alongside and from whom he could learn.

Despite the difficulties of assimilation and learning a trade on the fly, being an outsider was a blessing. By dressing like a tourist he could disappear into the crowd, shooting without drawing too much attention to himself.

“That’s the Chinese way. You do, and if there is a problem, then you discuss,” says Leleu.

Leleu presumed that China’s repressive tendencies might disrupt his street photography, but in fact he discovered — at least in the big cities which boast vibrant photo scenes – that he and his Chinese counterparts enjoyed a good amount of freedom to work.

Even so, when Leleu began Subtitles he chose to work under darkness to avoid detection. The tactic morphed into an aesthetic choice.

“I decided to go at night, like if I was a spy,” says Leleu. “Watching something I was not supposed to watch.”

Over time, Leleu began to realize that the Chinese public paid far less attention to the propaganda banners than he. Bluntly, the locals ignored them. Their indifference inspired Chapter 2.

“I wanted to make them start to look at them again,” says Leleu.

Friends tried to warn him off. Posing as a tourist and shooting official slogans was one thing, but hanging customized mockeries was an invitation to disaster. Like Chapter 1, he set off on his scooter under cover of darkness. When police failed to materialize, he tried earlier hours, until he was finally comfortable working at any time of day.

Chapter 1 began by scouting locations and figuring out the slogans afterwards. Chapter 2 began with choosing the sentiment and finding the location. He printed red banners with quotes from Confucius, historical phrases and his own humorous provocations.

Dragging a large format camera onto the street, climbing ladders and hanging signs is a guaranteed spectacle. If the police didn’t notice or care what the foreigner was doing, one woman on Shanghai’s busy Nanjing Road did take issue. While packing up after shooting in front of an Apple store, the passerby got in his face. “She yelled ‘What the hell are you doing, you are laughing at Chinese people,’ screaming as if I had bitten her,” recounts Leleu who was promptly circled by a mob.

He explained that he was working on an art project mocking Apple, not the Chinese. Rubberneckers rifled through his belongings and pulled mock banners from his bags just in time for the arrival of the police and store managers. After forty-five minutes of explaining the cops ordered the woman away and told Leleu he could leave.

Other run-ins with locals have gone much better. When elderly practitioners of Tai Chi saw the Frenchman struggling to prepare a shot they pitched in to help. “People on the street were surprised and intrigued and came to talk to me. They asked about the meaning; they wanted the subtitle! They understood what was written, but they wanted to understand my mind,” says Leleu.

Chapter 2 was a means to engage the Chinese, but he suspects no one really gets what he’s doing. None of the curious on the street ask to see the finished prints and he assumes that the project gets lost in the spectacle of the white guy running around being weird. But as his work begins to make noise online, that may change. NetEase’s prominent Chinese-language web portal 163.com has recently run Chapter 1.

If the intentions behind Chapter 2 are lost in translation, Chapter 3 does away with language entirely. Leleu hangs blank red banners in nature. The silent commentary is a natural conclusion to Subtitles, and there is more than conceptual aesthetics at play. As Chapter 1 critiques the development policies of urban China, Chapter 3 speaks to the environmental degradation of that country’s rapid economic progress.

“Nature is beautiful,” he says. “She is hosting us, and when someone is hosting you, you don’t put your feet on the table.”

Leleu felt printing statistics on banners hung in the western Chinese countryside too aggressive. He is undecided as to even identify where individual pictures were taken.

Work continues on both Chapters 2 and 3 on no strict timeframe. Chapter 1 is closed, but if funding was available, Leleu would like to coordinate a project shot by citizens throughout China to document the different provincial political concerns as reflected in the different government banners and slogans.

Leleu is preparing his first monograph, Daydreamers, for publication, and continuing to examine mass communication with Grow, photographs of blank billboards littering rural China.

“Billboards are another mass manipulation tool. Propaganda is. Advertising is. To me they’re one and the same.”